1. Field
The present invention relates to numerical simulation in multiple component products. Numerical simulation technologies exist, including structural analysis, which determines the effects of loads on physical structures and their components, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which is used to analyze and solve problems involving fluid flow and potentially heat flow; and electromagnetic/magnetic field analysis which maps fields and their effects across components and structures for example to approximate surface currents and interior fields arising in complex electronic objects.
2. Description of the Related Art
These types of simulations are a subset of Computed Aided Engineering (CAE), which is the use of computer software for the purpose of modeling and simulating the behavior of products in order to improve their quality.
The invention particularly relates to the field of numerical simulations which involve models of products composed of separately sourced components. The models are usually three dimensional but may also be two dimensional. A typical application is CFD, structural or electromagnetic field simulation of any scale, from data centers to servers in mobile communication devices or LSI (large scale integration) circuits, in which the model usually consists of many components and in which an important property such as electromagnetic field density or temperature may be varied according to the component chosen and/or its placement.
Numerical simulation has become a crucial step in the design and manufacture of many industrial products and facilities. Results obtained from numerical simulations may be used to increase the quality and reliability of products by optimizing the components placed within the product, or on a larger scale, within a data centre or room within a data centre.
The flow of a traditional simulation process is as follows, using CFD as an example. First, a CAD model of the system to be simulated is created or obtained. Before the simulation can be performed, the model has to undergo pre-processing, in which a mesh of the model is created and then boundary conditions and material properties are set. In meshing, the geometry is partitioned (meshed) by a mesher into a very large number of elements, to form a mesh. The mesh, accompanied by the boundary conditions, is subsequently sent to a solver which uses standard numerical techniques, like the finite element method, or, more usually, the finite volume method to compute the effect (in this case fluid behavior and properties) of the boundary conditions on the system, using individual calculations for each element.
Other common numerical techniques are the finite difference method and the boundary element method. FIGS. 1a to 1c show different kind of mesh data for different numerical methods. FIG. 1a illustrates a node and element data structure for a tri-mesh finite element method; FIG. 1b shows the equivalent quad-mesh data structure; and FIG. 1c a 2-dimensional finite difference grid structure. The data structure contains position information about the mesh/grid elements/nodes/intersections. Each grid/mesh is constructed to suit the shape of the component being modeled. For complex geometries with many components, the meshing stage is particularly difficult both from a computational point of view and because in many instances it involves manual work.
After the pre-processing stage has been completed, the CFD solver mentioned above executes a simulation/modeling stage which solves the numerical equations, generally using an iterative technique to obtain the results of the simulation. The process ends with a post-processing stage, in which the results are visualized and analyzed.
Related art methods aim to address the computing and/or user input time required to simulate complex CFD models, in particular for models that are a combination of a number of components. These methods include using components, whose properties including their component geometry, modeling properties needed for simulation, and individual mesh are known and combining them in a desired configuration to make up a CFD model of a product. This allows the components to be meshed only once and then placed within a range of products, by simple selection and positioning of pre-meshed components.
It is desirable to make this use of pre-meshed components more widely available.